From the reflection in the adjacent high-rise window, I see it: a faint blip of glint—armor plating—above the skyline. Not a civilian skiff. Not a courier. A dropship. Low profile. Approaching fast.
I move without thinking. Instinct first, thought last. My hand drops to the old kill-knife at my hip and I twist, slamming my shoulder into the balcony rail to use it as leverage. The dropship drops a little, like it’s correcting for turbulence. Someone’s aiming.
Back inside the apartment, a single muzzle flash blooms through the living-room glass.
I don’t register it with starched thought. My body simply does what bodies do when trained: I fling forward, shoulder first, and sweep Rhea with me. My shoulder slams into her ribs like a battering ram. I feel the impact like a bell clang through my sternum.
There’s a sound like a thousand strings snapping, a tear of glass, and then the world explodes into shards and noise and heat.
The blaster round tears through the window where ten seconds ago there was only glass and city light. It ricochets off the scrambler as if the scrambler were a god and the blaster a child making toy war. Glass screams like metal wind. The apartment is suddenly a storm of glitter and flying light, shards cutting the air, stinging skin. The living room fills with the smell of ozone and singed plastic, then the metallic copper of blood.
I roll, bring Rhea down behind the counter, and blast the back of my throat with a Vakutan curse that will haunt me later in ways the Alliance never could.
“Move!” I bark. My voice is a hammer.
She scrabbles, scrapes her knee, and drops the baton. It skitters across the floor, a useless twig in a field of broken light.
We’re both flat on the tiles. I feel the floor vibrate as more rounds rip through the outer wall. The drop-ship hovers like a malignant wasp, its door yawning. The heat pressurizes; I taste iron on the air like someone’s opened a wound.
“Outside,” Rhea whispers, as if being quiet can hibernate the explosion. Her breath is smoke, and I can feel the scent of it in her hair, and I want to pull it away and hold her until the world rights itself.
I move to the bay of the living room where the entertainment console sits. There’s smoke now, thick enough to make everything soft at the edges. The scrambler lies in pieces, sparking. My hands, huge and scaled and callused, move with asurgeon’s precision. I sweep the nearest shard away from Rhea’s bare calf and find blood where the skin has been nicked. It’s warm and sticky, and it smells like my poor decisions.
“Are you hit?” I demand.
“Shards,” she croaks. “Cuts. My thigh?—”
“Hold still.”
I press a hand against the wound. My hand is too big to be tender, but I keep the pressure even. Her breath comes in short stutters. Her shoulder is bruised where I hit her with my body. Fear glimmers in her pupils like a tiny mirrored bonfire.
“Valtron,” she whispers—name like a prayer and a curse. “They—how did they?—”
“They had to be set to intercept anyone transmitting the file,” I grit out. “They were waiting for a trace back to you. Argus set a trail. It caught. You were the point of contact.”
She swears. The word is soft and fierce. “I should never have opened it.”
“You didn’t know,” I say. “No one could have known.”
A second volley of rounds slams into the front of the building. The balcony railing shudders, and a chunk of concrete flakes onto the street below. A street vendor yells and ducks into a doorway.
We don’t have time to breathe in the grief. Hunters are either on the building, or they’ll send in boarding teams, or they’ll scorch the place to dust to get rid of witnesses. The options are all bad. None of them include staying.
I look at Rhea, at the way her jaw clenches. The way her teeth cut into her lower lip. She is furious and afraid and impossibly brave. It makes my chest crack with an ache I have no name for in a language where names are given like weapons.
“Can you run?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’ve asked if the stars are pretty. “Are you asking me if I can—what? Leap out the window and glide away like a hover-lark?”
“No.” I exhale. “Can you move? Can you get to the stairwell?”
She nods once. Her face is a hard shell now. “Tell me where.”
I scan for routes. Fire exit two floors down is the best bet. The lobby will be crawling—I don’t want to risk that. Rooftop is worse; it’s open and the dropship can land a team. I point to the alley where the building’s service access sits.
“Through the kitchen. Down the maintenance ladder I opened earlier. It dumps into the cargo chute that goes to the loading bay. We go silent. We go low. We move fast.”
“Maintenance ladder?” Her eyes narrow. “How do you know about our service entry?”
